Data entry is not only typing data in cells

Formatting the cell so that the data is easy to understand is equally important

Once we enter the data in cells, it is important to format the data so that it is readable, presentable and useful for the user

Walkthrough the sections of the ribbon

• Cut/copy/paste
• Font formatting
• Style
• Size
• Bold/Italic/Underline
• Colour
• Alignment
• Wrap text
• Merge & center
• Number format
•  

We will discuss all of these shortly

Font

Borders

Cell colour

Font colour

Number format

Alignment

Wrap text

Merge & center

Resize rows and columns

Format painter

1.Font: Change the font to Arial and size to 12

2.Font: We want our table headers/titles for the rows and columns to stand-out so let’s bold them

3.Number format: Change to Francs and add commas. Click “More number formats”, currency, no decimals, find RWF

4.Column width: Show that if the width is too small, the numbers won’t show. Can also highlight all columns and make one bigger and it will make them all bigger

5.Alignment: Let’s center the months

6.Borders: Let’s add borders so each of the rows stand out. Let’s also add a thick border under the months. If we want to restart or eliminate border, you can highlight the table and click “no border”

7.Merge & center: What’s the issue with the 2018? It’s not clear if it’s only January 2018 or each month is 2018. We will use the Merge function to format the 2018 across all months. Need to highlight the cells you want to merge. Now all the cells are merged into one with the 2018. We can add a thick border to this one

8.Cell colour: We can also make our tables more visually appealing by changing the cell colours. It can also be used to highlight certain cells. Let’s highlight the months in Green and the year in Blue. Does anyone notice anything odd when looking at the amounts for each expense category and month? 350,000 for electricity in April. What if we wanted to highlight the cell before we sent the document to our boss so it sticks out when they review it. Let’s highlight it yellow

9.Wrap Text: Our table is now looking good and much better than we started. There’s one last thing we want to do. The column with the total of year-to-date expenses looks weird because it’s wider than the rest because of all the text. We could shorten the text by putting YTD (show them how it overwrites so we must double click into the cell) but it’s still wide. If we collapse the width of the column, the text doesn’t fit. For this, we will use the Wrap Text function. Wrap text will automatically resize the cell so all the text is displayed

When you type in a cell and go beyond the boundaries of the cell, the text will be cut off visually (it will still be there, you just won’t see it). You can either stretch the cell manually, or click WRAP TEXT to automatically adjust the cell size

Below WRAP TEXT is MERGE AND CENTER which will allow you to merge two or more cells into one, and will also center any text within.

Format Painter: one of the most underused features of Excel. The Format Painter copies formatting from one place and applies it to another

Makes it easy to quickly copy formatting across many cells

The same function is in all Microsoft Office products

We will use it in later activities